'I can't believe someone died': Tearful Harriet Wran opens up about her addiction and role in drug dealer's murder during sentencing hearing
Harriet Wran, the high-profile former premier's daughter and now one of the state's most notorious prisoners, has tearfully told a NSW Supreme Court sentencing hearing of her battles with mental illness and her descent into the grips of a crippling ice addiction.
The youngest daughter of beloved late politician Neville Wran was set to be tried for the 2014 murder of Daniel McNulty last week, but instead pleaded guilty to downgraded charges of robbery in company and acting as an accessory to murder after the fact.
Harriet Wran on her way into her sentencing hearing on Thursday. Source: AAP
Wran appeared to smirk as she was led into the court but she was overcome with sobbing when she stepped into the witness box.
On Thursday morning she told a tearful story to Justice Ian Harrison as she thought about the death of Mr McNulty, and the critical injuries sustained by his housemate Brett Fitzgerald, multiple times every day.
"I feel terrible. I'm ashamed to have been involved in anything like that," Wran said.
"I can't believe someone died. I can't believe someone was so badly hurt. No one should lose their life in those circumstances.
Wran said she was in disbelief about being involved with someone's death. "I live with it everyday," she said.
The 28-year-old told how she developed anorexia, and then bulimia, in her late teens, and had been battling an addiction to methamphetamine for two and a half years before Mr McNulty was murdered by her then-boyfriend, Michael Lee, and his friend Lloyd Edward Haines, at an inner-city housing commission unit.
In the 24 hours before murder, Wran told the court she had three or four shots and smoked a lot of ice.
She cried while telling the court she did not know Lee had a knife.
She could hear noise coming from the bedroom inside the flat, telling the court "it sounded like someone trying to breath, but they couldn't".
Harriet Wran was born into an Australian political aristocracy as one of former New South Wales Premier Neville Wran's five children from two marriages. Source: Facebook.
Though she had a privileged childhood and attended two of Sydney's most exclusive private girls' schools, Wran said school was "a form of torture" for her.
She said she had been diagnosed with childhood ADHD and was prescribed Ritalin, which she kept taking until the age of 23, and dabbled with party drugs ecstasy and cocaine.
But she never believed she could become an ice user.
Harriet Wran is escorted from a prison transport vehicle at the NSW Supreme Court in Sydney. Photo: AAP
"It was in another league of drugs," Wran said.
"It was something I associated with, you know when you see the billboard signs of people basically rotting away from using it, that's how I felt about it."
But she turned her back on her own golden rule at "the most difficult time in our family life" - after her father's admission to hospital with dementia.
A rift in the well-heeled family over how Mr Wran should be treated resulted in Wran's mother Jill Hickson losing power of attorney, she said.
Wran at a happier time. Source: Facebook
"All of a sudden we worried about paying the electrical bills because our accounts were frozen," Wran said, as her mother closed her eyes in the public gallery of the courtroom.
"Dad was lost, he wasn't sure who to believe either and he had so many voices in his ear and we suddenly lost him."
In about August 2011 Wran was struggling to cope with her cocaine use and the "blight" of her spiralling bulimia, and was fresh from a stint in a rehabilitation centre when she went to a pub with a man she had met during treatment.
"And I can just remember him holding an ice pipe in front of me and I took some," she said in a quiet voice.
"There was just a chemical high that I never knew existed before that. And I knew straight away that my brain wasn't going to forget about that.
Neville Wran pictured with former Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Source: Getty Images.
The following years were marked by drug use, self-harm and admissions to rehab centres.
At some, Wran said, she was able to complete her treatment and get "clean".
At other times, the cravings for the drug ice were so strong she ran out. On one occasion she was so desperate for a hit she jumped a fence even as her discharge papers were being filled out.
Her final relapse came just over a month before Mr McNulty was killed, she said.
The hearing continues.
